Jeffrey A. Miller: IT as a Craft

Stephen, thanks for the mention, even under the circumstances

Sun, 22 May 2005 03:17:31 GMT

It was interesting to hear my name called out on your podcast. I wasn't trying to troll, that's for sure. I also thought it was interesting to hear how the topic came up--almost accidentally, as a side reference related to the very topic I wrote about. Radio Mike was mentioning Adam Curry's podcast content where "every ten or so words, he says 'F-you' or something...and it's like 'aaannnhh.'" That last word was as close as I could get to the spelling of the sound you make when you are unsure of whether you like something--you know, the so-so sound. In other words, Radio Mike's reaction seemed mixed as to the appropriateness of the language. Here's my point: I'm not saying that people can't say those words. All I'm saying is that some people don't like to hear them, thus taking away from their enjoyment of the content. And, since podcasts are, in most ways, public content, we should keep in mind how we would speak if we were in front of our grandmothers. Maybe the grandmother example doesn't totally fit, but I hope the picture is there. By the way, it sounded like you weren't clear on the part of the podcast I was referencing. The bit that I was referring to was the "Connection is down" song with "Holy S*** Batman! [garbled--Connection is down?]" and, later, "F***ing 404!" I have to say, the song was clever, but...well, you already know how I felt about it. At least I am listening. I heard a quote that says:

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
--Oscar Wilde?

You could probably change that to say "The only thing worse than being listened to is not being listened to." Well, it doesn't have the same ring, does it? But, again, I am listening. And I'm also learning: about podcasting, music licensing, and bluegrass music. So, when I do my first podcast, I'll have you to thank as an early example (not a negative one either). By the way, while I'm kissing up, I'll use this opportunity to plug a product that Stephen first informed me about, FMRadioStation (a.k.a FMRadio) for Radio Userland. Check out the FAQ. FMRadio does a good job of putting a friendly face on Radio, an application that is powerful and feature-rich, but not always friendly to users that want just a little more than the basic experience. Digging around in the outliner in Radio is not exactly the interactive experience I'm looking for. One of the features that I like about the product is that, similar to other news aggregators, it allows you to group news by source--something that Radio's web version of the news aggregator does not do by default. With Radio's news aggregator, you get exactly that: news. You know, like "Here's the latest headlines from all your subscriptions." But it's all mixed up. FMRadio does better at this without replacing Radio Userland--it's a good complement. Stephen was wondering how he made my "blogging short list." I added his blog, Blogging Alone, to my blogroll in June 2003 when he sent me an email message about FMRadio. I've been reading off and on since then. You can now find his podcasts (the Word of Mouth show) with Radio Mike at the Austin Podcasting Network.

Mon, 16 May 2005 19:13:54 GMT

Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters. Unlike architects (who figure out what to build) and engineers (who figure out how), great hackers and painters do both. Who makes a good hacker and how can you identify a good hacker/programmer in a job interview? Why is empathy an important skill for programmers? As a hacker who also studied painting in Europe, Paul may be uniquely qualified to write a book entitled Hackers and Painters. If you leave your day programming job only to get home and write more code, this is a great book for you. [IT Conversations: 'opensource']

IT Conversations, .NET Rocks!, and the F-list

Mon, 16 May 2005 14:46:49 GMT

IT Conversations is a set of interviews and recordings featuring well-known technologists on today's hot topics. The shows are often hosted by Doug Kaye from RDS Strategies. It's good stuff. Here are just a few of the featured personalities:

Steve McConnell
Jon Udell
Tim O'Reilly
Rasmus Lerdorf

I also enjoy .NET Rocks, which is syndicated (but not officially endorsed) by Microsoft Corporation. My one complaint is that the interviews are not edited for language. I would certainly appreciate the occasional <bleep> over the F-word (with Adam Curry for example on IT Conversations) and the S-word. I'm all for free speech. And I can understand the want to reproduce content in its truest, rawest form. But still, if you want to pretend that you're on par with real broadcast journalism, a little more professionalism is warranted. Sure, the Internet allows more freedom of expression than other media. That is to be appreciated in some ways, but in other ways it can be detrimental. Here's my F-list (those who have used the F-word or some other vulgarity in print or in podcast):

Dave Winer

Adam Curry

Stephen Dulaney (I didn't hear him say it, but he syndicated audio content with it in his "Daily Audio Browse")
I did, however, enjoy his podcast about SXSW with the bluegrass music samples.
Update: Stephen picked up on my rant, and, to my surprise, he mentioned it on his podcast. It's always scary when someone picks up on your criticism. But then, that's another reason why this medium is so great.

Mark Miller via .NET Rocks

Rory Blythe via .NET Rocks (not the F-word, but he did call Mark Miller a d***-less ignoramous)

and, surprisingly? (or not), Dick Cheney, here and here. Dave Winer complained about people questioning his professionalism and responded with this graphic from Mike Donnelan "demonstrating it." I won't pretend that I have never used those words. I have. But I make a point of keeping them to myself, rather than, as some Christians are accused of, "forcing my views [or language] upon someone else." I have a hard time enjoying content from the above list because of the reason I mentioned. Yes, I know--if I don't like it, I can always go away. I will keep that option open.

Steve McConnell needs a weblog

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:08:31 GMT

Steve McConnell is one of my heroes. His book, Code Complete, is one of my favorite programming texts--definitely a classic. Guess what? Code Complete 2 is out! Steve has a website. That's pretty cool. Here's his picture. But Steve doesn't have weblog. Maybe he should start one at Construx, his current company. Maybe when you write like he does, you just wait a couple years, put out another classic book, and wait two more years. Blogging, daily or weekly, doesn't fit into that model. Maybe that's what he prefers. But, as I have been on a binge of consuming the blogs of some great industry minds, I would almost expect to see a blog from the great Steve. So far, I've found blogs for the following:

I'm also hoping to find a blog from Larry Wall. He has a website too, but not a weblog. Here's his picture. Based on his website, though, I guess he values time spent on things other than blogging.

Joel on books

Wed, 05 May 2004 17:03:55 GMT

Joel's foreword to a new book on Software Development.

[Joel on Software]

Moving this weblog

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 10:25:41 GMT

Howdy folks! Boy that sounds corny. If you're reading this post on radio.weblogs.com/0113822, I am moving this weblog to my own server with a more 'appropriate' domain name-- http://www.xagronaut.com. And I've shortened the name from The xagronaut Chronicle to Xagronaut. I apologize for any possible mistakes I might make during this process. I have seen at least one article with tips on the process, but I'm afraid I haven't followed all of the advice. I appreciate everyone who reads this weblog, and I hope you will migrate all of your links to my new address. Thanks. Still to do:

Redirect RSS feeds

Investigate a conditional redirect from my pages at the Radio UserLand community servers to my new location--should I use some kind of conditional UserTalk script in my template, or maybe some JavaScript based on the window.document.location.domain?

Funny Thought

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 22:51:36 GMT

Data islands are seldom tropical.

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 22:43:43 GMT

The Register: Open Source Prepares to Kiss EU Patent Ass Goodbye [Linux Today]

Reinvent the Wheel or Not?

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 20:25:32 GMT

The Curse of Outlook.

In reference to Ximian Evolution, The FuzzyBlog! wonders, "Why is it that things that try and look and act like Outlook end up being the same type of slothful, buggy pigs like Outlook itself?"

He wonders if Chandler will also have the same fate, even "Is this just the natural end point for products that try and emulate Microsoft Apps?"

I wonder, is it worth the risk and time to create an application that behaves much differently? There are an awful lot of users out there that would find and Outlook-ish style application approachable.

I think that in the end, competition in the software space both hurts and helps innovation. It helps because competitors must both keep pace with each other *AND* find a new feature that beats the other guy. But, it can also hurt because no feature can be counted on to be totally compatible or integratable (easily) with other systems. Proprietary systems often lack just enough ease of integration to either require their consulting services or ensure entrenchment once the infiltration has been made into the IT infrastructure.

Still, it seems that complete refactorings come along every several years that summarize, in one place, all or a representation of all, of the advancements that had been made in the preceeding technological generation.

It's the pain of the early adopters all over again. The late adopters may not gain competitive advantage, but they are more likely to have offerings available that are easier to integrate, either by design of the software system or by the sheer availability of service organizations (VARs, consultants) competing in that space.

Tue, 20 May 2003 17:32:31 GMT

Indian IT Success Sparks Backlash. The global economic downturn has many folks tightening their belts. But Indian software workers may be caught in an additional pinch -- a growing resentment of their country's success as a source for cheap technology outsourcing. Manu Joseph reports from Mumbai, India. [Wired News]

Ray Ozzie's Early Groove Architecture Stories

Wed, 14 May 2003 03:10:37 GMT

Here's a good story of a critical decision gone right.

A Project Communication Tool

Wed, 14 May 2003 03:00:15 GMT

Outreach Project Tool 1.0.0 (Max) [freshmeat.net]

My company has been yearning for a project "dashboard" application that helps customers and developers, testers, project managers stay in good communication with each other. I'm adding this to the list to come back and review.

Publisher shake-up

Fri, 09 May 2003 05:36:25 GMT

Rockford Lhotka's site mentions some shifting in publisher ownership. Much to my surprise Wrox Press has gone belly-up. APress and Wiley have moved in to cast lots for the scraps.

APress has purchased the bulk of the Peer Information (including Wrox Press) titles. Wiley purchased the Wrox Press brand name and 36 titles, and now the liquidation of the assets is complete with APress buying all remaining assets.

Rocky's book, Visual Basic.NET Business Objects is sold out on the major online retailers.

3500 copies of the book were printed by Wrox Press before they went bankrupt. From what I am hearing, these are sold out so Amazon and bn.com no longer have them. It is possible that you may find a copy in a physical book store, but otherwise I am afraid we'll have to wait until the first Apress printing of the book.

Specs In, Widgets Out?

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 22:57:09 GMT

Issues for global IT outsourcing. InfoWorld discusses issues surrounding global IT outsourcing.

It’s tempting to believe global outsourcing is as simple as “specs in, widgets out,” jokes Brian Behlendorf , co-founder of Brisbane, Calif.-based CollabNet -- an ASP that supports distributed software development -- and co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf points out, however, that in reality things never work that way. “Those specs and widgets are embedded in a complex and subtle framework of collaboration.”

They also go on to discuss some lessons IT managers can learn from open-source development projects. [The Job Blog]

Mainframes Never Die?

Wed, 09 Apr 2003 14:18:24 GMT

TechRepublic: CIO Update: Future of the IBM Mainframe Looks Surprisingly Good [Linux Today]

Hmmm...

What I hated about the IBM mainframes was that a lot of the organizations that relied on them were staffed by stuffy, old-school programmers unable or unwilling to see the value in doing anything new with technology. Many times it was obvious that they were hoping to coast on their current skillset in their current job until retirement.

Forget trying to teach an old COBOL jockey about object-oriented techniques. Heck, even event-driven programming was a stretch after eating-drinking-sleeping top-down procedural programming all your life. I know COBOL programmers who insist that too many separate paragraphs leads to excessive performance overhead. You're kidding, right? What about code maintainability? Oh, right, I forgot. You're only interested in job security.

I once made the mistake of complaining about a COBOL program that I had to maintain and modify for Y2K. I said to my manager, "Man, this code ugly, and there's no documentation or comments to help." It turns out that he was the primary author of the code. He said, "Jeff, if I'd have documented all of this stuff, I'd be making $20,000 less than I am."

Don't get me wrong. I understand COBOL. I used it for close to six years between college and three years of dreadful jobs that included it. Now, I don't even include it in my advertised skillset. Yeah, I could still go back and write a PICTURE clause if I had to. Ironically, I wrote a utility in Turbo Pascal and then Quick BASIC 4.5 Professional to generate PICTURE clauses for me.

What I don't like about COBOL is its monolithic style. All variables are global. Encapsulation and modularity are hard to come by. There is no support for parameter passing to in-program functions. Dynamic arrays are a pain. And, if you're data is not fixed-length in every instance, you may as well tear your hair out manipulating variable-length strings. Don't believe me? Just try presenting a "Last Name, First Name" on a report. You'll have to munge it up with the STRING statement DELIMITED BY SPACE (or some similar junk that I've thankfully forgotten). Sure, you can call other programs by way of a LINKAGE SECTION, but please! That's a lot of crap to go through just to introduce some modularity and reusability.

Now, we could argue that some "innovative" (not) companies have revamped COBOL to put a new face on an old language. But I say that it's not really COBOL any more. Micro Focus tried to introduce Object COBOL in the mid 1990s. Now Fujitsu has introduced a .NET compatible compiler. No thanks. I don't feel like arguing about the merits of COBOL. I hope Fujitsu sells a ton of the product. More power to them.

Anyway, as far as the platform itself goes, the IBM mainframe is very robust and well-engineered. A system administrator friend of mine told me that they took an IBM mainframe and carved it up into about 1,000 virtual machines and ran virtual Linux servers on a couple of the VMs. Now that's cool.

Yo, can u plz help me write English?

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 13:05:02 GMT

From USA Today: Parents fear online chatting ruins kids' language skills

April Fool's (maybe)

I first spotted this article on the front page of USA Today for April 1, 2003. The teaser read like this:

u r what
u write
Language of online chat mangles grammar and omits punctuation - 9D

After turning to page 9D I quickly saw that there was no article by that title. I couldn't find it on the next page either. I'm thinking, "How cute! USA Today made a funny on April Fool's day." As it turns out the article was at the top of 8D instead.

Ah, yes, irony. An article about English skills is put on a different page than advertised. The problem with being a pedant (as I well know) is that every time I take an opportunity to criticize and critique, I usually make mistakes in or near my critique.

On to the article

You can find the online version of the article at USA Today's website.

My favorite quote:

A father realized that his son put this on his job application: "i want 2 b a counselor because i love 2 work with kids." The father immediately yanked AOL instant messenger from their computer. Yikes!

Funny fingers

I tend to be a perfectionist about all of the grammar and spelling rules that I can remember from school. I even bought an American English usage guide recently so I could refresh my skills. Strangely, though, my fingers seem to have a mind of their own (some might call it "muscle memory"). I often find that my fingers have typed letters or words that sound the same as the word I am thinking about. (Examples: "there" for "their," and "no" for "know")

Fear of the future

Sometimes I worry that the new "script kiddies" with their "k3wln355" (coolness) will eclipse technologists with more experience just because they are able to tackle the new, cool stuff quickly. But then I think, "It will still be a while before the generation currently in charge will hand over big corporate dollars to these 'dudes.'"

Call me crazy, but I'm not yet wild about wiki

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 00:50:34 GMT

I just don't get it yet. Maybe I still have a while to explore personally managed content, but wiki just doesn't make sense to me. Oh, well. Maybe when I have the time, I will explore the cultural aspects of it.

Yeah, don't knock it until you've tried it. But it's not really on my radar as important yet.

Now, I like the idea of it being used within a small group for documentation purposes like the link above mentions, but a world-writeable wiki...Well, I just don't know.

A Bold Declaration

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 03:39:55 GMT

GvR: Strong vs. Weak Typing.

Guido van Rossum: Strong versus Weak Typing:

Strong typing is one reason that languages like C++ and Java require more finger typing. You have to declare all your variables and you have to do a lot of work just to make the compiler happy.

[Keith's Weblog]

I'm sorry, but I can't sympathise with someone who is too lazy to declare variables. Period.

The disgust with excess typing I can understand. I feel your pain. I don't want to worry about the type of a variable on every statement but omitting variable declarations is without excuse.

Immortal Code, I like it...

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 05:11:53 GMT

Wired 11.02: Immortal Code. The CEO goes to trial. The programmers hit the street. And yet sometimes a piece of code is so elegant, so evolved, that it outlasts everything else. [Daypop Top News Stories]

Ahah! I knew it! Square Wheels...

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 19:21:08 GMT

When everyone has to reinvent the wheel, many people invent square wheels. -- Jakob Nielsen.

What's the market?

Mon, 23 Dec 2002 01:37:09 GMT

A dreamy shareware author (me) wonders: "How much of a market is there for add-ons to other major products?" I'm pondering the practicality, marketability, and impact on my sanity (and my wife's) of exploring potential add-ons to products like Microsoft Outlook, Groove, Radio UserLand, and TreePad. Not Groove, so much, because I really don't use it much anymore. It was too hard cheerleading my not-so-computer-loving friends and family into using an interface or package like Groove. Great stuff, but it requires a lot of like-thinking people in a tighter community than I was able to muster. Ah, well, I do enjoy publishing to my weblog for anyone to read. Maybe I'll also get around to building and/or acquiring that content management system I've been dreaming of to manage the personal website I've been dreaming of.

Ah, yes, those dreams just keep coming. The problem is that I build so many dependencies into my dreams that none of the dependencies are met, and thus, none of the dreams are realized. Stop that you idiot! (That was me talking to me for just a second.)

Way to Go Delta!

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 04:28:05 GMT

Delta gets it. About six months ago, the passenger to my right informs me, Delta Airlines installed the new information system that I just experienced for the first time at La Guardia airport this morning. It's one of the most effective uses of information technology I have ever seen. Even if you don't usually fly Delta (as I don't), you might want to wander by one of their gates next time you're in an airport and check it out. Air travel still sucks, of course, but Delta earns my eternal gratitude for a brilliant application that makes it suck less. ... [Jon's Radio]

Yes, I REALLY need to buy this book

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 05:28:12 GMT

Design Patterns [Slashdot]

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 05:25:26 GMT

uiweb.com: The ten reasons ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects. In reviewing all the email I've received at this website, and the experiences I've had teaching and consulting, I've tried to catalog the different reasons why projects didn't result in easy to use designs. [Tomalak's Realm]